Analysis: Recent California newspaper editorials

The Associated Press, None

July 20

Los Angeles Times: "UC gets smarter about budget cuts"

Dwindling state funding has presented the University of California with a menu of unappetizing options during the past few years. Its first efforts to cover the gap were clumsy, harming students as well as its prestigious reputation. This year, university officials have gotten smarter about surviving the recession intact.

With the state unable to fund the number of California students who should be accepted, according to the Master Plan for Higher Education, UC obviously couldn't continue with business as usual. It reduced class offerings. Most campuses reduced enrollment, providing fewer residents of the state with access to its premier institution of higher education. And it raised fees, putting it out of the reach of many middle-class families.

UC's reputation - Berkeley is ranked as the top public university in the nation - wobbled as more students were drawn to other schools and those who enrolled at UC hunted for seats in needed courses. And it unwisely continues to consider charging more for some majors, such as economics.

But this year, UC President Mark Yudof has pushed a smarter approach, long advocated by this page. In May, the university announced that it would centralize administrative functions such as payroll and purchasing among its 10 campuses, an efficiency measure that will ultimately save half a billion dollars a year. Last week, it released enrollment data for this fall, showing that the number of out-of-state and foreign students would increase dramatically at UCLA and especially Berkeley. Those students are top achievers who bring in money by paying out-of-state tuition. They also bring more diversity to campus.

California students still pay a price. Berkeley has been criticized for reducing the number of state residents it accepts as it doubles nonresident enrollment. But most UC campuses have been reducing admissions whether or not they enroll more out-of-state students. The schools simply cannot afford to educate, at their own expense, more students than the state has been willing to pay for. As more resources become available, UC and the state must make the admission of more California students a priority; but as a long-term strategy, enrolling more out-of-towners is a judicious decision that will preserve the state's crown jewel of higher education.

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July 15

Orange County Register: "Solar subsidies in eclipse"

One problem with relying on sunlight to generate energy is that it's an unreliable source. The government is even more so.

The California Public Utilities Commission "stunned public officials and the solar industry" last week when it suspended "lucrative rebates" to public schools, municipalities and other government agencies for installation of solar panels on their buildings, reported the Contra Costa Times. Nonprofit groups relying on the subsidies also are affected.

Commission officials said a temporary suspension is necessary until they can decide what to do about the "rapidly depleting solar budget," the newspaper reported. Some plans to install panels are expected to be canceled.

"That's going to kill us," complained Bill Savidge, engineering director for the West Contra Costa Unified School District, which was preparing to install solar panels at two schools. "Changing the rules in the middle of the game is just crazy."

The "rules" regarding government-distributed subsidies are changeable by nature. None were written in stone to begin with, so whatever rules government commissars decide at any time are subject to change later by other government overseers.

Solar thermal energy not only is unreliable because sunshine can be intermittent, it is more costly than conventional alternatives. "Because solar collectors must be very large, they use high volumes of nonrenewable materials in their construction, resulting in high energy costs," is how the National Academy of Sciences put it.

Consequently, solar energy requires subsidies to make it economical, in this case subsidies paid by electricity ratepayers, whether they want to or not.

To avoid running out of subsidy money that it redistributes, the PUC will consider lowering rebates to tax-exempt organizations. This is necessary because many more applications have been received than were anticipated when the Solar Initiative began in 2007.

The fact that demand soars when government gives away money in this case in the form of subsidies shouldn't be a surprise. The popularity of the giveaway diminished the $1.7 billion set aside for rebates more quickly than was planned.

The suspension doesn't affect residential or commercial projects, but will last up to three months while the commission gauges reaction to reducing rebates. "The worst thing we can do is have agencies delay (solar projects)," an official with the trade group Solar Alliance told the Contra Costa Times.

We disagree. It would be worse to rely on unreliable government-distributed subsidies to finance what already is an unreliable and otherwise uneconomical source of energy. As usual, it seems no one looked beyond the immediate gratification of artificially propping up something that costs more than its worth.

"You can read this ruling as good news in that it's a logical response to enthusiasm for the program," the newspaper quoted Steve Weissman, a UC Berkeley law professor and former PUC administrative law judge. "But you wonder what's going to happen (to solar installations) when the incentives disappear."

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July 20

San Diego Union-Tribune: "A different Democrat?"

Jerry Brown bills himself as a different sort of Democrat. The attorney general's unconventional biography certainly backs that up. Over the past 40 years, while secretary of state, governor, presidential candidate, radio host and mayor of Oakland, Brown has variously seemed like a conventional liberal, a rowdy populist and a pragmatic moderate.

But when it comes to helping Californians brutalized by the state's economic downturn, Brown's bid for a third term as governor finds him sounding like a carbon copy of Democratic legislative leaders. Even though state unemployment has been 12 percent or worse for nearly a year, Senate President Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker John Perez have done little to spur private-sector job growth except for "green" industries.

The most significant measures to help industries with the misfortune of not being "green" have been bottled up by Steinberg and Perez for possible eventual use as chits during budget negotiations.

This is politics at its worst. Yes, public employees dominate the Democratic Party. But most Democratic, Republican and independent Californians alike work or seek work in the non-green private sector. They need help badly. Basic measures like tax credits for companies that add jobs should have been adopted long ago by the Legislature.

Yet when Brown and Republican rival Meg Whitman skirmished last week over how to boost the state economy, all Brown offered was a clean-energy plan that he claimed would create 500,000 jobs. Like Steinberg and Perez, Brown seems indifferent to all the other sectors of the economy and eager to promote the unfounded assertion that "green jobs" alone can cure California's economic malaise.

Yes, such jobs are vitally important, and it's heartening to see California proving to be a resilient leader in many areas of clean-energy innovation. But even such a stalwart of the environmental movement as the Next 10 think tank pooh-poohs the idea that green industries can revive the state's economy.

Last year, Next 10 reported that even though green jobs had grown by 36 percent in California since 1995, they still comprised less than 1 percent of all state jobs.

An April report from the respected McKinsey consulting firm said the clean-energy industry was very similar to the semiconductor industry, a relatively tiny employer not to jobs-heavy manufacturing. McKinsey questioned whether green jobs would ever account for even one of 100 U.S. workers. These findings are buttressed by the real-world failure of green-job campaigns by governments in Oregon and Spain.

If the state economy were purring along, perhaps a focus on helping just one niche industry might be OK. But California is in the middle of an enormous crisis, with millions of families facing a daily struggle just to get by. They desperately need jobs. We implore Jerry Brown to break free of the Steinberg-Perez mindset and care about every worker and job-seeker in California not just those who work for or aspire to work for the government or a green industry.

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July 20

San Jose Mercury News: "Online retailers need to collect sales taxes"

Annual online sales across the United States will account for nearly $150 billion in 2010. But cash-strapped states, including California, won't get more than a fraction of the $18.6 billion of sales tax they should be collecting.

Congress and state legislatures need to find a way to end online retailers' unfair advantage over brick-and-mortar businesses - and to reap a fair share of revenue, since so many states rely heavily on sales taxes to balance their budgets.

California lawmakers are considering a bill that would require retailers that do not collect the tax directly to send the state a list of purchasers. It's a clunky fix, since tracking people down will cost money, but it's a start. The Legislature should pass Assemblyman Charles Calderon's AB 2078.

A better solution would be for Congress to pass Rep. Bill Delahunt's "Main Street Fairness Act." The Massachusetts Democrat's bill would allow participating states to streamline their sales tax systems to remove the excuse that out-of-state retailers now use to avoid collection: The fact that there are some 7,500 tax jurisdictions in the country with different tax rates.

We have the technology today to design software to calculate the appropriate amount of sales tax for any jurisdiction, but a simpler system is likely to get results more quickly. Supporters of Delahunt's bill have convinced 23 states to join a coalition for this simplified system. California isn't one of them but it should be, with its $19 billion deficit.

This would not be a new tax. Anyone who makes an out-of-state purchase, online or otherwise, is supposed to keep track of it and then pay the appropriate sales tax along with income taxes. Since no one is enforcing that law, it's remarkable that California collects about $10 million each year from its most law-abiding residents. But some $1.1 billion goes unpaid.

Consumers enjoy the cheaper prices for products online. But local businesses that create jobs and generate revenue for our communities deserve to be on an equal footing with their online competitors as a matter of principle. And we all will benefit from the additional tax revenues that pay for public safety, transportation projects and other services.

It's been 15 years since Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com and introduced large-scale e-commerce to the world. When online companies like his were startups, it made sense to allow them a grace period on collecting sales taxes to promote a new industry. A case still can be made that small Web-based companies with sales of less than $100,000 should be exempt from collecting sales taxes.

But too many large online and catalog businesses are enabling their customers to be tax cheats.

If California had collected online tax revenues for the past decade, it would have an additional $10 billion at its disposal today, reducing its deficit by more than half. The Golden State is in no position to let another dollar of potential revenue go uncollected.

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July 20

Sacramento Bee: "Ed tech funds sit idle as state bickers"

California, home of Silicon Valley and the most sophisticated data systems in the world, ironically cannot seem to put together even the rudiments of a public education data system.

In its Round 1 application for federal Race to the Top funds, California received only six of 24 points for its statewide data system.

And the state continues to rank near the bottom for student and teacher access to and use of technology, receiving grades of D+ to F in Education Week's yearly "Technology Counts" reports.

That is why it is perplexing and discouraging that California has been unable to get $70.9 million in one-time federal stimulus dollars out of the door to local school districts for technology to improve learning in the classroom.

The Obama administration announced these one-time funds (a supplement to regular Enhancing Education Through Technology grants) in July 2009. It came after California's regular budget process had ended, yet other states managed to act in timely fashion. At this point, ours is the only state that has not distributed the funds.

Lawmakers essentially had two options for acting quickly last summer. They could have: Followed current education code in distributing the funds as they had the previous eight years. Changed the distribution formula during the summer 2009 special education session.

Lawmakers didn't act during the special session, so the state Department of Education proceeded under the current education code. Then in November, legislators put on the brakes, suggesting that the governor and the Education Department should "work with the Legislature to craft an alternative expenditure plan" that "furthers state and local education technology objectives in a more strategic, comprehensive manner."

Here we are a full year later, and lawmakers are still dickering about how to best spend these one-time stimulus funds in the middle of a gridlocked budget process. California is running out of time and winning national notoriety for its procrastination.

Under pressure from school districts and the federal government, lawmakers in the past two weeks finally released half of the funds (using the current education code formula). But lawmakers continue to argue over the other half more than $30 million.

The fact that California cannot manage to figure out how to use relatively small one-time grant funds in a timely fashion does not inspire confidence in the state's ability to get a long-term data system up and running. In fact, it shows just why California lags so far behind other states.

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July 20

Merced Sun-Star: "Reason for hope in budget stall"

Here we are, with the mercury regularly hitting the century mark, and California legislators remain unable to produce a spending plan for the fiscal year that began 19 days ago.

But there are vague glimmers of some modest hope that there may be, dare we say it, progress. Then again, this impasse could spill into August.

Democrats, Republicans and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger agree they have figured out how to fill about $11 billion of the $19.1 billion deficit. That last $8 billion is the tough part. Democrats have agreed to significant cuts to social and health care programs that they hold dear. Now they want to delay the start of $2 billion in tax breaks that would benefit corporations. Republicans need to agree.

Importantly, Superior Court Judge Patrick Marlette last week denied Schwarzenegger's request for an order that could have resulted in state workers being paid the minimum wage.

The governor's threat was a cheap bargaining ploy that needlessly caused civil servants anxiety. The governor ought to drop the idea, rather than press for a preliminary injunction.

With that barrier out of the way, at least for now, the administration and public employee labor leaders will be meeting this week at the bargaining table, a step that could help shave some costs.

In another hopeful sign, Speaker John A. Perez last week seemed to be distancing himself from what had been the cornerstone of his budget proposal, $9 billion in borrowing.

His goal was reasonable, to maintain funding for social and health care programs, and avoid large numbers of layoffs. But Assembly Democrats were wrong to think they could solve the state's perennial budget crisis by pushing the state deeper into debt.

There is reason for some hope that the budget can be resolved. But legislators and the governor need to re-engage, and quickly. More delay will further destabilize the shaky economy, and cause pain when the state starts failing to make timely payments.